CCRI faculty critical of 'J-term' outcome

Linda Borg Journal Staff Writer @lborgprojocom

Wednesday

Feb 13, 2019 at 1:17 PMFeb 13, 2019 at 1:20 PM

Ninety percent of the more than 250 students who completed one of the 19 courses offered in person or online received a C or greater. That's a pass rate significantly higher than the same courses offered during the fall and spring semesters.

WARWICK — While the Community College of Rhode Island is calling its new winter session a success, some department heads are complaining that the courses weren't as rigorous as typical semester-long classes, that students received unusually high grades and that faculty members weren't asked for their input.

One department chairwoman questioned whether the rush to implement a compressed winter term, called a "J-term," was aimed at getting more students enrolled in the Rhode Island Promise program to graduate in two years.

"I'm disappointed that the administration chose to move ahead without having made an effort to engage the faculty about what courses would be offered and how they would be offered," said social sciences chair Leslie Killgore. "This was not a collaboration. It doesn't represent our best effort."

Faculty have opposed the three-week January session since its inception and they blocked the offering last year. In November, four department chairs — math, English, social studies and business administration — told college administrators that they wouldn't participate in the winter session, which is commonly offered at community colleges across the country.

The English department chairwoman Christine M. Fox wrote that it would be academically unsound to teach these courses "without thorough review, discussion and endorsement by the department."

Killgore, in a separate email, wrote that the majority of her faculty felt that these courses should not be offered in the absence of a collective-bargaining agreement. The faculty union is in contract negotiations.

CCRI President Meghan Hughes in November said, "We have hundreds of students across the college who would be able to graduate this spring or summer by completing one additional classes this winter."

She said the J-term would be good for Rhode Island Promise students, among others. Promise is an initiative of Gov. Gina Raimondo that offers recent high-school graduates two years of free tuition if they attend CCRI full-time and maintain a 2.5 grade point average.

CCRI said 12 of 19 winter courses were offered online. The policy requires all online courses to contain, at minimum, the same components of a traditional classroom course, according to CCRI spokeswoman Amy Kempe. She said 47 percent of winter session instructors have a doctorate.

But Raymond Kilduff, chairman of the psychology department, called the general psychology course offered during the winter session a "gut course," because it didn't cover the breadth of material typically offered in a regular session. He also said that the administration didn't allow him to review the curriculum, nor did it permit him to evaluate the instructors, none of whom were CCRI faculty.

Of the more than 250 students who completed one of the 19 courses offered in person or online, CCRI said 90 percent received a C or greater, a pass rate significantly higher than the same courses offered during the fall and spring semesters.

But Kilduff said that is an apples-to-oranges comparison. He said that half of the students who took general psychology had taken the course before, not because they had failed, but because they wanted a higher grade to get into an applied health major.

"These were better students to begin with," he said.

"I can think of four different reasons for those grades and none of them are good," he said. "First, these are better students … they are not the Promise students. Second, the college hired people who lowered the standard, so they made the course easier. Third, there was no oversight, and fourth, the weakest students dropped out."

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